Re: NFSS2 and math mode

lomov.vl schrieb:
If I typeset
$\sin\alpha = \mathbf{\cos\beta}=\mathbf{\sin x}$
in bold will be only x. Functions name are in roman. This is OK and
expected. But \beta will be in italic.
One familiar with NFSS in text mode would expect that \beta will be in
bold too. One scheme one rules.

The limitation can be related either a) with availability of fonts or
b) with design lack.
The a) as I understand can be considered as temporary restriction
(e.g. free or commercial
available fonts could solve the problem) but the b) require further
development of font selection scheme.

The truth is more complex. TeX's math typesetting rules are quite
involved; for the full picture, read the TeXbook or TeX by Topic.
Basically, TeX knows "alphabetic" characters which are selected
according to the current "family" (like roman, bold, ...), and
"non-alphabetic" characters which always stay the same (unless you use
some tricks like the bm package). In standard LaTeX, only Latin
letters, Greek capital letters, and digits are alphabetic. That is
because these are the only characters for which the Computer Modern
fonts actually contain different shapes. There is no point in allowing
bold small Greek letters if you have no font that actually contains
them. Another complication arises because only non-alphabetic
characters obey the complex spacing rules needed for math typesetting.
Furthermore, the fonts associated to a given non-alphabetic character
cannot be changed inside a formula. All this (plus more) severely
limits the abilities of TeX's math typesetting engine. That's why
OpenType math, accompanied by appropriate fonts, is so badly needed. At
the moment Word does outperform TeX when it comes to mathematics. You
can perform some tricks to work around these issues, but that is not a
real solution, and you'll never be able to hide the fact that TeX is
just too simple-minded for the 21st century.

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